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>>Wade:Hi, I'm Wade Wingler with the
INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads
in Indiana. Today, we're going to talk about
a really cool mainstream product that comes from
Apple that makes a mouse a little bit easier to use
and might allow somebody with a disability
who has a limited range of motion to use a mouse
and a computer in a completely different way.
So in just a second we're going to go here and take
a look at this Macintosh computer and the Magic
Mouse.
You know, when we talk about adaptive computer access
a lot of folks might have trouble with the keyboard.
Well, I want to show you a couple of things about
an Apple product called the Magic Mouse which makes
the keyboard a little less useful or at least gives
folks a different way to access the computer.
So the first thing I want to do is show you. This is
the new Magic Mouse from Apple and it looks like pretty much
a regular mouse. It's small, it happens to be wireless,
but the interersting thing about this is that the
entire top surface of the mouse is actually a multi-touch
system. So, you'll see there's no button. The whole thing is
a button. You can right click up here in the top
corner, you can also scroll up and down by using one finger
or two fingers and there's different gestures
that allow you to control things on your computer.
So I'm going to jump down here onto my iMac, and you're
going to see that as I use the Magic Mouse here, when I move
up, it's going to allow me to scroll up and down.
Or if I move my finger left and right, it's going
to allow me to scroll my window back and forth. Another
neat thing about this is if you are in
a web browser and you do the
two finger swipe to the left, it's going to back you up
through your history, so you can go forward and backwards just by doing
a two finger swipe.
Now over the years, I've worked with a lot of people
who have difficulty with range of motion.
They may have very good movement in their hands,
but not a lot of different distance
they can cover. Well there is a trick you can do on a Mac.
I'm going to go down here into "System Preferences"
and I'm going to click on "Language and Text" and then
"Input Sources" over here. And the very first option is the
"Keyboard and Character Viewer." When I check that,
it turns on in the upper right hand corner, a
little icon here that represents the keyboard
and I can click "Show Keyboard Viewer."
Now what that does is it brings
up an on screen keyboard here on my computer that I can
resize, make it as big or as small as I need it to be,
and then I can type with that keyboard.
So if I fire up Microsoft Word, and get a new document
going here, I can then use this to type whatever I want.
So if you think about it between the combination of the
built in onscreen keyboard and the extra features of the
Magic Mouse, there's a whole
lot you can do to not use a keyboard and still have access
to the Macintosh computer. And a little bit later,
we're going to talk about a program called the Better Touch
Tool which takes those gestures that are available and
expands them to an even more customizable environment.
So again, that's a pretty cool thing coming to you from Apple.
So that's your Tech Tip for this week. I'm Wade Wingler
with the INDATA Project in Indiana.